A Visit with the Abuelo

My first journey to sit with the abuelo was with Taita Cesar and two close friends, traveling to the border of Colombia and Ecuador. It felt like crossing not just a geographic threshold, but an internal one. The maloca was dark, lit only by candlelight — shadows dancing against wooden beams, smoke and prayer weaving through the air. We strung up our hammocks side by side, suspended in that dim, breathing space. There were no buckets; when purging came, you leaned over the edge of the maloca and offered it back to the earth. It was raw, unfiltered, stripped of the comforts and structures I had known elsewhere.

The grandfather spoke almost the entire ceremony — but he was not speaking to us. He was speaking to the spirits. His words moved in a cadence that felt ancient, rhythmic, relational. I was told he sometimes paints his tongue purple so that when he turns into a jaguar in the spirit world, he does not eat the people in ceremony — a teaching both mythic and symbolic, pointing to the magnitude of what is navigated in those unseen realms. We had to step out alone into the darkness of the jungle to find a hole they had dug for us to use the bathroom, guided only by intuition and faint memory of the path. The stairs leading from the maloca were far apart and moved with every step, luckily I didn’t need to use the bathroom during this ceremony, a rare occurrence for me.

That first ceremony dismantled my ideas of control and comfort. It was not curated or softened. It was elemental. And within it, a message came through with startling clarity: consciousness is a gift. Not something to manipulate or conquer — but something to steward with reverence. That understanding has stayed with me ever since.